


Rabbit Season

by apiphile, Sunquistadora



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Gen, M/M, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic Length: 30-45 Minutes, canon typical attitudes toward everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-20 07:33:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11916144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunquistadora/pseuds/Sunquistadora
Summary: Some years after he was confronted by the reality of his not-quite relationship with Laurie Odell, Andrew Raynes finds himself once again facing the man he punched over the revelation; but circumstances have changed, and he's called upon to find some of the better nature he believes he has.





	Rabbit Season

 

 

[MP3](http://sunquistadora.parakaproductions.com/RabbitSeason.mp3) | Duration: 00:38 | Thanks to Paraka for hosting!

 

 

 

Andrew Raynes, carefully arranging printed pamphlets on the pine tables of Friends House, Euston, rather like a man arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic - in the wake of the lunchtime parties of schoolboys who liked to come and desecrate the place - only barely noticed the smooth and calculated entrance of a man in a beautifully-cut and very modern suit. It registered in the part of his brain that he usually took great pains to ignore.

 

Straightening the last of the informative one-sheets about The Friends and their method of worship, he unbent from over the table just in time to receive, by way of a greeting, a scathing remark.

 

"My dear, how dreary," murmured the voice, unwelcome and familiar. "One would have thought that the joyous embrace of the Lord or whatever it is you do in here might benefit from a splash of colour. You're the only living thing in the place; quite the best advertisment for the faith."

 

Andrew took as deep a breath as good manners would allow him, his face flushing hot and furious almost immediately, and gave the not-as-strange-as-he-would-like stranger the benefit of his direct stare.

 

The last time he had seen this man, and assumed him to be Ralph Lanyon, he had struck him - stung with the shame of truths he'd never wanted exposed, shoved into his face without discretion or compassion, like dirty postcards.

 

Rather to his surprise, though some six years had passed and with them demobbed soldiers, general elections, elation, despair, and some of his certainties, the man who wasn't Ralph Lanyon bore a blooming black eye on an otherwise beautiful face, as if Andrew's punch had been only a day before.

 

"Well don't just stand there gaping," the man murmured. "I'm afraid we got off rather on the wrong foot last time, I know, but there's really no need for you to pull a face like like a turbot on ice."

 

"It looks," Andrew said, with all the frostiness he could muster from behind his burning cheeks, "as if you've been getting off on the wrong foot with someone else recently, too."

 

"Oh," the man's brilliantly insincere smile faltered momentarily as he touched manicured fingertips to his swollen eye socket. "Oh yes, well. I'm afraid not every bit of trade appreciates a compliment, and some of these rough boys play a little rougher than one expects."

 

"I'm sorry," Andrew said, with pointed politeness, as he was no such thing. "Did you come here for a reason?"

 

"Why yes," said not-Lanyon, his eyebrows arched immaculately. He made a vague scrabbling motion towards the regimented lines of pamphlets, and delicately raised one, taking care not to knock any of the others out of alignment. He was wearing a discreet Cartier bracelet just under the cuff of his shirt, and it slipped down to the top of his hand and back with the movement. "I've come to learn about," he gave the pamphlet a cursory glance, "The Universal Congregation."

 

With a triumphant quirk of the lips, the man who wasn't Ralph Lanyon met Andrew's barely-contained dislike and burning eyes, waiting for the next move. Andrew was quite sure his knuckles must have turned white, but he only said, "I had no idea you were interested in free worship."

 

"My dear, I'm interested in free anything," said the man, lazily. "Especially gin, as it happens. Oh dear, you people don't drink, do you. Well, never mind."

 

Andrew decided it would be wisest to refrain from comment at this juncture. Dave might return within the hour; then again, he might not return until the morrow. He could hardly decide which might be the worse outcome.

 

“D’you people abstain from everything then,” the man with the black eye and the supercilious manner asked, with another brisk smile, as he fanned himself with the pamphlet, “or only fun things? I noticed you _personally_ don’t shy away from violence.”

 

Andrew felt his cheeks redden even further. The thick walls of Friends House insulated them from the traffic on Euston Road, but he was quite sure that a policeman could and _should_ be flagged down in moments if he seized this intruder by the jacket lapels and shook him. More to the point, he should never live down the humiliation of being goaded into losing his temper this way.

 

“Oh dear,” the man added, examining Andrew’s face at closer quarters than Andrew felt was civlised, “I’ve been rude again. Mustn’t let the manners of the drawing-room intrude upon the place of worship... I suppose this _is_ a place of worship?”

 

Through teeth unclenched only by effort and possible miracle, Andrew said slowly, “Yes. We believe that one can speak to or with God anywhere.”

 

“Now _that_ ,” his interlocutor said with a smirk, “I find I must agree with. If one broadens one’s definitions a little.” He hid a smile behind the pamphlet. “I don’t believe,” he added, extending one hand more limply than Andrew suspected he would have done in company, “That I’ve ever formally introduced myself. Well, not _properly._ ” He made a gesture as if whisking away a fly, instead of unblinkingly dismissing a serious deception that had led him to what must have been a near-concussion, if the pain in Andrew’s hand had been any indicator. His letter to Laurie had been painful to write in any number of ways.

 

“No,” he agreed, the memory driving him to new heights of unfriendliness. “I believe you have the advantage on me.”

 

“Oh, if only,” sighed the invader, taking Andrew’s hand to shake it before Andrew could resist. His palm was warm and soft, but not unpleasantly so. “There. I’m Edmund Christophers, but practically all of my friends and a good few of my enemies call me Bunny.”

 

He released Andrew’s hand and smiled engagingly, like a child who has been told that if he keeps this up he will be awarded some sort of treat when the visitors have gone home. He held his head very still, like a dancer.

 

“I suppose I shouldn’t trouble to introduce myself to you again,” said Andrew flatly, wondering what there was about a simple handshake to make him feel so out of sorts, aside from this Mr Christophers' shameless, open homosexuality. “As I recall last time you knew rather more about me than I should have expected from a perfect stranger.”

 

“Not so much as I should like,” said the man styling himself as “Bunny”, “But, water under the bridge, perhaps? A new leaf, a fresh start? One never likes to make a poor first impression.”

 

Andrew supposed it would not be charitable, kind, or useful to inform this “Bunny” that he was making a significant fist of his second impression too. He held his tongue until it could be trusted, and said, “And you just _happened_ to drop by here? Why now?”

 

There was a pause that went on for too long, and Bunny’s smile grew fixed, ragged at the corners. “Oh, well,” he said, dismissing some internal debate with a flap of his hand. “Out with it, I suppose. A friend – quite a close friend, as it happens – topped himself yesterday, and I’m in the market for some _spiritual reassurance_.”

 

“I’m –“ Andrew began, wrong-footed and horrified by his own failure to provide adequate comfort, to have even supposed that there might be finer feeling lurking under Bunny’s brassy and vacuous exterior, but even as he lamely blurted, “I’m really, very, quite sorry –“, Bunny was speaking over him, a little too loud, and a little too poised.

 

“Oh, not the sort you, er, _Friends_ , is that it? You _Friends_ offer,” he said, touching his hair. His smile was rather brittle now, verging on the wan instead of the winsome. Andrew found himself hypnotised, the perfect lines of printed paper on the low table between them mocking him somehow. _Friends. Friends_ . “As I said, I rather prefer Mother’s Ruin. I only.” He gave a short, forced laugh. “Well, my dear, the truth is I’d rather like to get myself horribly, horribly squiffy and forgot the whole thing but – oh dear – I’m something of a _talker_ when I’m in my cups. A-and. Well, there’s not really anyone I can trust not to be a _gossip_ , you see. Not in town. Oh, Alec helped knock up a fake certificate to save his family’s feelings – listen to me, rambling on – but he wouldn’t…” he drew out the R in _rambling_ , and tossed his head.

 

“I’m not sure I follow,” Andrew murmured.

 

Bunny sighed, and seized Andrew’s hand. In an artificially humorous voice, he cried, “Be a dear and sit with Mother awhile, I – there isn’t anyone _left_ not in town, who won’t either gossip … or go to the police.” He lowered his voice.

 

Andrew did not shake Bunny free. He knew he ought to, but the pathos of his plea, buried under glib theatricality, gripped his better nature. “You couldn’t, er, alone?”

 

Bunny grimaced and trotted out another laugh so fake and forced that it made Andrew a little afraid the man was cracked. “Who knows what I’d _do_ ,” he said, still smiling a desperate, toothpaste advertising smile, of the sort one saw beaming from placements in the jealousy-traded American imported magazines. Bunny’s eyes, blue and anxious, dogged him with a more honest expression; it did not match up to the smile at all.

 

“And you thought –“ Andrew pointed out, “After what happened _last time_?”

 

Bunny withdrew his hand abruptly. “No, my dear. I didn’t. But there isn’t anyone else.”

 

 

The sun was setting as he followed Bunny up the stairs to a building he might otherwise have scrupulously avoided for its unsavoury character, down a back street in King’s Cross. Its neighbour was a naked mass of burnt beams and broken bricks, a wheelbarrow half-loaded with pilfered whole ones sitting in the soot-streaked ruins. Saxifrage bloomed like tiny white stars in that blackness.

 

“It’s nicer inside,” Bunny said. He looked incongruous here in his elegant suit, against first the flaking paint and then the shabby backdrop of peeling wallpaper on the staircase: one, two flights up.

 

It occurred to Andrew that Bunny’s job probably didn’t pay him as much as he liked people to think. He wondered what it was. But Bunny cut through his thoughts, pull the lightning cord and casting tastefully shaded light over a very modern and precisely-decorated room. A curtain, shimmering, shielded from view what must only have been a single bed, but there were two low lounge chairs, a table, and a drinks cabinet with scuff marks along the bottom, as if it had been moved more than once.

 

Bunny threw open the latter. “Do have a seat,” he said, rummaging in it. “I shan’t be long, I’m sure. I’m out of practice. Of _course_ when I lived with _Ralph_ it was hardly prudent to match _him_ drink for drink either. Confound it, where’s the – oh, no more sugar left either.” He produced a glass and hesitated. “Do you—“

 

“No,” Andrew said, sinking very slowly into one of the chairs, a process which seemed to go on for some time, “I don’t.”

 

“Quite sensible, it’s a filthy habit,” said Bunny, throwing himself into the other chair with a glass in one hand and a jug in the other, as if he had performed the same manoeuvre a thousand times before. “Now, what shall we talk about. _I_ know. Do you work? I can’t imagine that saving souls pays the rent.”

 

Andrew said, “No, it doesn’t,” as Bunny poured himself a generous measure.

 

“Well?” Bunny urged him, brightly. “Talk, do. Tell me about it. I can scarcely talk and drink at the same time myself, I’m not a ventriloquist.”

 

And so as Bunny worked his way through the jug, Andrew found himself describing the minutiae of work as a shipping clerk. He found Bunny a surprisingly attentive listener; he knew it was not possible that he was being interesting, and there was no way he could think of to enliven the details of his days, for while his thoughts were often deep they were also slow to form and highly theoretical, not the typical stuff of what he imagined to be the kind of theatrically witty conversations people like Bunny must engage in. And yet Bunny listened with wide eyes, apparently transfixed, and, when his mouth was not occupied with his glass, nodding encouragingly and making “mm” noises.

 

“Do you mind if I ask,” Andrew began, when Bunny’s expression had grown a little more unfocussed, and the jug sloshed with dregs when his host picked it up.

 

“Ah—“ Bunny held up a warning finger, and squinted at the digit. “Blurry,” he said, with satisfaction. “Ask away, my dear.”

 

“Who is Alec?” Andrew asked, his mouth dry. It wasn’t what he wanted to know, but six-year-old transgressions mattered little now, even if they still mattered to him more than they ought.

 

“Oh,” Bunny gave an aborted toss of his head and laid the jug on the table on his second attempt. Andrew leaned forward and moved it gently to a slightly more secure spot nearer the table’s centre. “A _friend_ . Well. He doesn’t like me very much. Most of them don’t, really. They think I’m stupid, you know. Or a bit of a _sssssnake_.” He cackled at this sibilance, and checked himself, his amusement fading. “Fred didn’t. Think that.”

 

Andrew sank back on his chair. “Was that who---“

 

Bunny nodded energetically. “Yes, _this_ week.”

 

His head drooped to one side, hiding the black eye for a moment.

 

The sight of it stirred a spark of shame that had been smouldering in the ashes of Andrew’s dignity since he laid eyes on Bunny in his unexpected second meeting. “I really – I really ought to apologise,” he mumbled.

 

“Oh, don’t be _silly,_ ” Bunny slurred, raising his head. “Whatever _for_ ? It hardly matters—“ he hiccupped, “—matters if you spilled something. This place is a _sty_. There’s a brothel downstairs. They think I don’t know but I – I do.”

 

“For the black eye,” Andrew said, clutching the arm of the chair for support. Downstairs, almost on cue, something began to shake. After a moment he realised it must be trains passing, but for a second his as-yet-still-learnt instincts had believed shells were falling again.

 

Bunny looked blank, and gently touched his bruise again. “That wasn’t _you_ ,” he said, and to Andrew’s horror his shoulders gave a convulsive heave, and his lip trembled. “It. _He_ did. He did it.”

 

Andrew blinked, as confused as Bunny, but before he could ask, his host had let out a terrible sob, undercut with a whine like an abandoned child or dog, and pitched forward over his own legs.

 

“You think it’s just the way they look when they’re laid out or like at the pictures, that they just lie there pale and sad and nice and just – I don’t know – just die – and it’s – it’s not – it’s so – it’s _fucking ugly_ —“ Bunny howled.

 

After spending the war as a known conchie, tending injured soldiers who hated him, evacuating burning buildings of people who distrusted him, and trying, usually without much success, to prevent the more venal A.A.R.P. wardens from looting the houses they were meant to be patrolling during raids, Andrew was not exactly taken aback by the use of coarse language. However, Bunny had seemed so softly-spoken and so elegantly composed that seeing him now, snotty and flushed and sobbing, gave him pause.

 

“Yes,” Andrew said.

 

But Bunny, perhaps understandably, was not listening. “I _tried_ ,” he wailed, doubled over, his glass clasped between his thighs along with both hands. “I _tried_ to make him stop I _did_ – he just –“ a string of spittle hung out of Bunny’s mouth. His face was bright red now, and somewhere level with his knees. The effort of sobbing rendered his voice younger; Andrew knew he must have a good five years on him, but at this moment his host sounded more like a boy of seventeen, his voice catching in his throat. “He just _punched me in the fucking face and shut me in the cupboard_.”

 

Absurdly, despite knowing it must have happened somewhere else, Andrew looked around. There was indeed a wardrobe, its handle torn off, door ajar, but it surely could not be the same item of furniture.

 

“And all the _banging_ and banging and I couldn’t see and then there was this horrible smell because he’d, he’d fucking _shat_ himself and I didn’t know what to _do_ and Alec called me a rotten _liar_ and I had to call him twice and now I’ve got no fucking _money_ , I just stood, I just stood there in the street at the, at the phone with his _bloody shit_ on the front of my clothes and, and,” Bunny heaved over his legs, his hair hanging loose, and shook his head. “He shut me in the _fucking cupboard_ I had to _listen to these noises_ , it just.” He hiccupped.

 

Andrew watched tears, like spilled gin, dropping down from the end of Bunny’s nose onto the carpet. Bunny’s face contorted once or twice, mouthing words he didn’t fully understand, and with an effort to free himself from the clutches of the lounge chair, Andrew knelt down beside the sobbing man and put a cautious hand on his hair.

 

“No need,” Bunny said in a dull, flat voice. He flung himself backward, dislodging Andrew’s hand, and stared at the ceiling, tears still trickling unhindered down the sides of his face. There was drool on his chin: he made no move to wipe it off. “Usually it’s not so bad but you find out the next day or the next week and then there’s a funeral. It’s almost cosy, you know. Everyone gets drunk and shares stories. But he _shut me in the fucking cupboard_.”

 

Bunny took a deep, shuddering breath, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

 

“Ow,” he added, having just pinched part of his own bruise. “Did you know?” he asked Andrew, apparently rhetorically. “I mean, I think I knew. Before. I’m sure Ralph mentioned it in one of his bloody sermons, that when they hang someone he _shits himself_? Well, they do. They shit themselves and they hang there with their face all. All.” His face began to droop at the corners of the mouth, a grizzling sound creeping in behind his words. “That’s. That’s what they do, you know.” Bunny made a futile attempt to arrange his hair with the palm of his hand.

 

“I’m sorry,” Andrew said, rather weakly. It was a fantastical exhibition. He’d seen similar from old women outside pubs in the East End; it was somehow even uglier on a good-looking man almost his own age. He laid a hand on Bunny’s forearm. “Really I am.”

 

Bunny made a face, the kind of face one makes when one is trying very hard not to start crying again, and said, “You look rather like Ralph in some lights.”

 

“…Usually?” Andrew said, suddenly struck by something he’d heard but not really registered.

 

“Usually you look like Ralph in some lights, what?” Bunny blinked at him stupidly. “Be kind, dear, I’m rather sloshed.”

 

“You said _usually_ you find out the next week,” Andrew said. It was only too clear that Bunny was, indeed, extremely ‘sloshed’.

 

“Well, one doesn’t see one’s friends every _day_ , so sometimes, you see, you’re at a party or someone will call round, and they’ll say, have you heard, Terrance has blown his brains out. Or – Angus, poor dear Angus, has been pulled out of the canal. They had a closed casket for Angus, as you can imagine.” Bunny sniffled; Andrew passed him his handkerchief without thinking about it; the casual list of names invoked a rather deeper line of thought than mere handkerchiefs.

 

He bit the inside of his lip. “You aren’t being facetious.”

 

“Frequently, my dear, but about this there’s no need.” Bunny sniffed violently. “You see,” he said, arranging strands of his own hair with the tips of his fingers, his poise slowly returning, “When you’re a _dirty queer_ —“ the words, as violent as the blow to his face must have been, sounded like spitting; Andrew could recall hearing it shouted, muttered, thrown about with venom on any number of streets. “—One’s friends check out all the time.”

 

Andrew gave Bunny’s forearm a tentative squeeze, unable to formulate anything that felt like enough.

 

“Of course, it’s just a drop in the ocean, really,” Bunny said. “Half the boys from the barracks turn up at the coroner’s courts within a month of being demobbed, don’t they? It’s awfully easy to pass things off as misadventure, and even if they _do_ give a verdict of suicide, if he’s served one can always secure a mite more sympathy with ‘shell-shock’ than ‘blackmailed by his ex boyfriend’.” Seeing Andrew’s expression, Bunny folded his arms, pulling Andrew’s hand with him, and gave a great sigh. “ _That_ was Bernard. Of course, we didn’t find out about the blackmail until afterward.” He swatted an imaginary fly. “Sandy _said_ , if he’d only talked to someone they’d have told him how to deal with it but Bernard was always very melodramatic.”

 

“What—“ Andrew coughed. “What happened with… with your friend?”

 

“Which?” Bunny patted Andrew on the back of the hand with his own damp handkerchief. “This isn’t mine.”

 

“No, it’s mine. Your friend,” Andrew persisted, gesturing at his own face with his free hand to indicate injury to the eye.

 

“Fred,” Bunny said, and his chin began to wobble. “Oh, _Fred_. Me.”

 

“What?”

 

“ _Me_ ,” Bunny said, too loudly, blinking. “Me, us, the whole thing. He just got _sick_ of it. Everything we – all of us – represented. He didn’t want to be – no one _wants_ to be, do they?” Bunny’s watery, unfocussed eyes locked onto Andrew’s, bloodshot and momentarily furious, “No one _asked_ for this, Andrew, did they?”

 

“I suppose not,” Andrew said, trying to extricate his hand. Bunny’s grip tightened, his knuckles pale.

 

“Well, there you are.” Bunny threw up his hands, handkerchief and all. “There you are, my dear. Queers, you see. We’re awfully _weak_ , aren’t we? Can’t take the endless ... everything.” He let his hands fall. “Oh, we can’t all be Ralph bloody Lanyon. Hiding in plain sight. Some of us have to be just ordinary, sad, lonely little _queers_ , and you get so _tired_ . I can’t, I can’t quote bloody … Plato or whoever it was, and I’m afraid, my dear, I never was much of a one for poetry, I didn’t really understand it, you see, but, but… you get so _tired_ , of. Of burying your friends for no good reason.” Bunny pressed the backs of his hands gently to his eyes and gave a sorrowful little laugh. “It’s like the war never stops.” He twisted Andrew’s handkerchief between his fingers, and stared down at the cotton scrap with a confused expression. “This yours, is it?”

 

“Mm,” said Andrew.

 

“He shat himself,” said Bunny, shaking his head, in the tone of one concluding an odyssey. “I only went to get back the shilling he owed me.”

 

His chin wobbled once or twice more.

 

More to keep himself from witnessing the disintegration of Bunny’s fragile composure a second time than from any great wellspring of tenderness, or so he believed, Andrew rose up on his knees and pressed Bunny’s bruised face against the front of his shirt, his hand to the back of the man’s head, as the next round of sobs came out.

 

Andrew lowered his head until his mouth touched the back of his own knuckles, and thought, _Forgive us_ . He asked, in general, for the world, and in particular for the strange and sad world he knew himself to belong to by right if not by deed: _Forgive us._

 

**Author's Note:**

> Cover by Sunquistadora
> 
> Sunquistadora: Thank you apiphile/saxifraga-x-urbium for being my brother in suffering. Thanks to ritterssport for being the best podfic beta. Readers/listeners: please validate our life choices and tell me if you cried.


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